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“M-Mike?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Shit, man, don’t move. There’s a mine five feet in front of you. Stay right there. Let me come to you.”
Teddy Polk nodded, but it was a vague movement and Mike couldn’t be sure if his friend really heard him.
“Stay right there, okay, buddy? Don’t move.”
Teddy swayed like a drunken man, but he didn’t take another step.
Mike began creeping through the deadly landscape he’d created. He knew where he’d planted everything, and the yellow and orange tags were there, the colors glowing with luminescent paint even in the darkness, and pulsing when the lightning flashed. Mike was almost to the safe zone when he heard a sound behind him, and he pivoted, expecting to see that idiot Cyrus.
It wasn’t.
A woman stood directly behind him.
Middle-aged, dressed in jeans and a sweater covered in flower appliqués and blood. A woman with ragged bite marks on her cheeks and eyebrows. Black blood dribbled from between her lips.
“Shit!” cried Mike as he reached for his side arm.
The woman spit right into his face. Into his eyes and mouth. A big, wet gob of black blood.
Mike screamed and backpedaled, dropping the gun that was halfway out of its holster. The black muck was as thick as molasses and it tasted like copper and bile. He gagged, but he could feel it in his mouth. Itching. Burning. He pawed it out of his eyes as he reeled. He could see, but only a smeared swatch of the world. The woman hissed and reached for him, but Mike backhanded her away.
Then Teddy Polk caught him, kept him from falling.
Teddy called his name.
Except that wasn’t what Teddy said.
It wasn’t his name. It was just a meaningless moan. Not his name, not even a word.
A moan.
Like the sound the woman made.
Mike screamed.
He tore free from Teddy Polk and shoved his friend—or whatever this thing now was—and watched the wounded soldier stumble backward. Two steps. Three.
And Teddy’s foot came down on a pressure mine.
Mike tried to run.
He really tried.
He pivoted in the mud, spun the woman behind him—trying to put her between his body and the blast—and Mike bolted for the steep upslope that was free of mines. He got four good steps away from Teddy before the blast.
The shockwave picked him up and punched him hard into the slope. He felt something hit him in the lower back. He felt it stab him.
Stab all the way through him.
He half-lay, half-stood against the sharp canted slope, his chin resting on the knurled curve of an exposed tree root, his arms dangling at his sides. Thunder echoed in his ears and he could feel warmth running in lines down the insides of his clothes, front and back. It was the only warmth he could feel; everything else was strangely cold.
Off somewhere to the north he could hear someone call his name.
Was it Cyrus?
Was it his mother?
